When Mr. Chana coughed uncontrollable, Nate took a pause, and two of Chana’s men grabbed him and held him back. Mr. Chana rolled away, breathing hard and holding his face. A deep line of red leaked from his nostril into his mustache and chin and all over the front of his fancy blue vest. He crawled away through the heavy sludge and spit a bloody tooth into the mud.
“I submit. Je suis désolé,” he said, mumbling through his swelling lips.
Still held down by Mr. Chana’s men, Nate thrashed and flailed, landing a few more kicks at Chana’s right leg. When a shot cracked above the commotion, everyone turned to see Mr. Colton pointing a rifle to the sky, its barrel smoking. He dropped the rifle and held up an Indian basket. One of the Indian women tried to grab for it.
“Stop your fighting, Claude. You’ll get all the ladies you want later. Looky here in this basket! We’re rich! Stinking rich!” said Mr. Colton.
The men let go of Nate to help up their boss. Mr. Chana pulled a white handkerchief from his front breast pocket to stanch his bloody face and staggered over to inspect the find, clutching his nose. Nate scrambled up from the mud and ran to his wife, holding her close, smoothing her hair and whispering calmness over and over as if to soothe himself.
“I’ve got you. You’re all right. You’re all right now.”
Nate draped his arm around her shoulders like she was a delicate bird and guided her toward the trail. She didn’t spoil the sweet moment with the truth: She’d encouraged Chana’s advances. She’d led him on. And she wasn’t scared by Chana or the fight, either, but stirred up by the violence of watching men fight in the mud. She looked over her shoulder at Claude Chana holding up a chunk of golden rock nearly the size of a man’s fist, as if to show her what she was missing. The Indian women waded into the water with their apron hides billowing out around them as they clutched their reed baskets and floated away downstream into a kinder uncertainty.
7
“We but half express ourselves . . .”
Back at Henry’s claim, Elisabeth and Nate didn’t bother sleeping inside their tent, as the night filled with a gentle heat, sweet and dry. Under the bright stars, they curled up together as the sounds of the river canyon lulled them. A screech owl echoed who-who-who-who off in the trees, and the crickets chirped hypnotic and in sync. As the warm wind drifted through the pine tops and the water tumbled rocks along the river bottom in a smooth crunching chorus, the strange place cracked Elisabeth wide open with expectation.
Wrapped in Nate’s arms, all her knots loosened and wilted with want. He smelled of books and beans and kindness and family. She nestled in closer, wiggling her bottom up against his trousers, hoping to get him excited. His breath quickened heavy and he kissed her neck, his scruffy beard scratching her skin. He turned her around to face him in the dark and worked his lips around on hers, sloppy and urgent, causing a tingle between her legs. Light and floating, she wanted more. She let out a moan, perhaps a little forced. As Nate unbuttoned his pants, she scrunched down her drawers and lay on her back waiting for him. The moonlight streamed down on Nate’s privates, lying limp like a rag. Undaunted, she kissed him with fast, little kisses on his cheeks and neck, searching for his lips. Instead of kissing her, Nate turned his face away. Instead of touching her, he started touching himself. When she put her hand on his to help things along, he pushed it away.
“Let me do it,” he said.
Nate fell upon himself with vigor, pulling and pulling as if he were alone. She propped herself on her elbow, watching with curiosity as Nate worked on himself, moving his hand back and forth in long pulls, faster and faster. Seeing him yank on his privates struck her as odd. She didn’t understand why he found more pleasure from his own hand than with her body lying ready. Perhaps he simply lacked the quickness of a younger man, needing extra effort loving himself before loving on her. It seemed exhausting work, requiring a strong arm. She used to think a man needed a wife for this sort of pleasure. Since marrying Nate, nothing had quite gone as she’d expected.
They’d left the mills after the wedding. The first leg sailing from Massachusetts to Panama was crowded and uncomfortable. She’d remained patient, huddling in steerage below with Nate and a hundred other passengers during the baleful storms. Nate had complained about the atrocious food: first bland bits of boiled chicken, then measly rations of too salty pork. Crossing the Isthmus of Panama proved easier. Elisabeth had relished walking on solid ground, and Nate had acted more joyful, picking her bananas and singing silly sea shanties he’d learned from the sailors up on deck. But the exorbitant price of travel and supplies bled their meager savings. When the donkey drivers and bungo boys charged far more than expected to get them upriver to Panama City, Nate had turned rude, griping loud when the rain soaked them through and sniping at the bungo boys for the least thing, telling them how to pole the river bottom and where to tie up for the night, as if he were the river expert. Instead of sleeping in the bungo beside her, he’d raged on the muddy riverbank like a madman, swatting at the mosquitoes with his hat, cursing foul at the demon creatures, as if he were the only one getting bit. She’d responded with an unhealthy dose of silence, wrapping herself up in her shawl against the bites at the bottom of the hollowed-out bungo boat to sleep, thinking a few little biting bugs shouldn’t turn a man whiny and weak. She wondered then if she might’ve made a mistake in marrying him, like Louisa May had warned.
That last stretch onboard the coal ship up the Pacific had passed in dreadful misery. The Humboldt Captain had taken on more folks than the ship could hold and promised more food than he’d stocked. The tea ran out during the first week. She conserved her share, taking bits of leaves from the bottom of her cup and drying them flat in the pages of her Emerson book. For the next month, they had only tepid water from a rusty barrel, insipid stew and hardtack. Traveling left them exhausted, with hardly the energy to make conversation. Nate spent most nights up on deck pacing with worry at not getting enough to eat, while she lay awake on the hard boards below, lethargic and empty and itching something awful with the angry welts left on her once-smooth skin by the Panamanian mosquitos. She believed in the puritanical notion of a devoted woman, holding in her anger when Nate stumbled down at sunrise smelling of rum. Most mornings he’d only manage to mumble a few words before drifting into a deep sleep, his chest rising and falling with the motion of the rolling sea. During those long days sailing up to California, she’d watched him dream while she seeped through with salty disappointment like the rusty cleats on the railings above. She believed the difficult travel made Nate distant. Uncertain. She’d tried to look past her disappointment and focus on the possibility of growing closer once they made a home out west.
As Nate worked at himself by the river, she fixated on his blond tuft. Seeing him yank into a frenzy made her hot and tingly, which seemed lurid and lovely and wrong, but she didn’t care. When he pointed straight up in the moonlight, the tingle between her legs swelled to a throb. Not wanting to lose the moment, she slipped off her dress, tossing it aside in the sand. She felt wild, lying naked in the open, waiting. Nate moved over her, keeping hold of himself, still tugging. When he started poking the tip on her thigh she reached out, but his stiffness recoiled like a shy creature with a mind of its own. She let it go, fearing her forwardness turned him off.
“I told you. I gotta get it going by myself,” he said.
When he started slapping himself against the inside of her thigh, awkward and rough, she closed her eyes, trying to find the pleasure in it but worrying she should help in some way. And worrying, too, that her own throbbing might weaken.
“Put it in,” she said.
He didn’t hear her, just kept jerking furious.
“Quick! Do it now,” she said, louder. “Put it in.”
When he moaned lusty, she thought he’d begin the loving on her. But he remained oblivious to her lying in wait, and grunted and grunted, coming on louder and faster with the speed of his own hand shaking and shaking, until his
whole self surged and trembled, and he spurt out on her leg. The heat inside her faded away into emptiness. With a sour sorrow oozing off her, she looked up at the moon waxing angry and cursed silent at his selfishness. She rolled to the edge of the blanket, ashamed at them both and disgusted at the crevasse splitting wider between them.
“I didn’t mean for it to go like that, ’Lizbeth.”
He covered her nakedness with the quilt and stifled a snivel with a cough. Raging silent with sadness, she listened to the American grumble by while trying to convince herself his faint capacity for loving might be for the best. She couldn’t see mothering a child way out here in the wilderness anyhow.
8
“A man must consider what a blindman’s bluff is this game of conformity.”
With no alternative prospects presenting themselves, Elisabeth and Nate attempted to make a go of the Goodwin Claim, panning side by side on the riverbank in front of Henry’s cabin, swirling and swooshing in the mud, trying to find something, trying to build something out of nothing. She understood now Henry had been the single source binding them together, like a mast on a clipper ship rigging the top and bottom sails. With Henry gone, they’d lost all wind, flapping loose and limp yet side by side. Instead of ripping apart, she settled on floating alongside Nate, trying to fix her tenuous marriage. Trying to figure out how to make him happy.
During those early fall days they eked out a meager living, realizing that nothing divided a woman’s work and a man’s work on the American River. With so much to be done, the work itself emerged as the great equalizer. They found a few flecks of gold in the river, which was better than nothing, storing them up in a leather poke Nate wore around his waist. In between digging, she kept up mending. She carved a sign on a board with a penknife and staked it at the juncture on the river trail. Mending—50 Yards Upriver. It was closer to 150 yards, but she knew once a fella got to walking in a direction it wasn’t easy for him to turn back. At least a dozen or more hopeful miners passed by the Goodwin Claim everyday, hiking along the river looking for good spots to dig, and she asked every single one if he had mending or washing that needed doing. Quite a few did, or said they did, anyhow, presenting her with torn-up pants and shirts and overcoats for her to fix. She turned a decent profit, given she conserved thread, and soon started making soap using ashes from their fire ring and a spot of pork fat, adding crushed-up pine needles she’d collected to the soap for a sweet scent. For an extra dollar she’d wash miner’s clothes, or sell them a sliver of pine soap if they wanted to wash their stinky selves clean.
Nate kept mostly to himself, picking and panning and doing other useful chores that needed doing around the claim. That first month he was ambitious, splitting logs and stacking cords of wood to keep them warm through the coming winter. And he built a proper outhouse a ways downriver, digging a deep pit, for which she was grateful. Working around the claim seemed to sap Nate’s strength. At night, he avoided getting close, sharing the warmth of the fire ring at a respectful distance, quietly eating a measly grub of beans with bits of pork off tin plates. After supper, Nate wrote in his notebook by the firelight, never sharing his musings, while she read and reread Emerson for answers, wondering if the man had considered the fairer sex when writing “Self-Reliance,” and what he’d thought of the womanly expectations of marriage, reasonable or otherwise. They still slept in their tent since Elisabeth insisted loudly she’d never set foot inside Henry’s cabin.
“I’ll not sleep in the same place where he was loving on that girl,” she said.
“Then let’s pray for a mild winter,” he said, rolling his eyes.
When Nate smirked, he somehow managed to look both irritating and charming. She saw flashes of the man she’d fallen for back in Lowell and believed that however distant he acted toward her now, that man was still inside him. Somewhere. He might still crack open and offer her loving.
After writing, Nate went directly to sleep. They slept under the marriage quilt she’d made for their wedding back in Lowell, but Nate closed himself off, keeping a space between them, never touching her. A few times, she placed a hand on Nate’s shoulder, but he didn’t respond, sighing heavy as if he was irritated she’d disturbed his dreams. She couldn’t help but feel an invisible barrier dividing them, spoiling her efforts, preventing them from growing closer. She blamed herself for his cool distance, worried her previous advances made him feel inadequate. Nevertheless she remained hopeful, each night washing with her soap and putting on her clean pantaloons and undershirt before crawling under the blanket beside him. Just in case.
Maybe seeing her dig like a man in the river repelled him. She could hardly blame him, knowing she no longer looked beautiful. She’d become something of a sight with the man pants she’d made herself, which she now wore under the gray working dress she’d cut short and mended up below the knees. It proved a practical outfit on the river, but not at all attractive for a woman. Her full hips had thinned and hardened with the rough, physical efforts of panning and her boots had busted clean through, so she dug in the river wearing an old pair of boots she’d found stashed under Henry’s cabin stoop. Wearing his boots somehow kept a drop of hope alive that he might return someday, no matter how foolish. She still stored her green dress folded up in the trunk inside their tent, seeing no occasion to ruin it digging in the mud.
When her straw hat cracked in the middle, she bought a tattered felt hat off a fella passing by for a dollar. It was a crime, taking the man’s hat for so little, but he was despondent, saying he had a mind to sell every stitch of his clothing from here to San Francisco even if it meant getting to his family back in Georgia naked. Wild-eyed and haggard hollow, the man said he was done, sapped of all spirit, his strength drained from the hard going of digging in the river with nothing to show for it. Elisabeth felt pity for the man and gave him a slice of jerky for his journey. They couldn’t spare it, but her heart saved a soft spot for a man willing to risk so much for his family.
Her motley-man costume looked peculiar, and diggers passing by often mistook her for a man, until she tromped through the shallows, waving and calling out, asking if they need sewing done. Then they’d stare and stare, trying to make sense of her man pants, too-big boots, floppy hat, and long braid frayed frizzy down her back. She’d smile and let them look, knowing a warm manner meant more money for mending.
With her sewing and their gold finds, they managed to keep fed in beans and dried apples and the occasional slice of salted pork or jerky—not quite enough to stave off the perpetual state of hunger. Nate bought their food from a new town sprung up on the ridge called Coyoteville, saying it was closer than walking the way back downriver to Culoma Town. He hiked up the ridge once a week to buy what little food they might afford, going alone, insisting she stay around the cabin in case someone got a notion to jump their empty-looking claim. In truth, she relished the time alone. When it got dark, she climbed into her tent and rubbed herself, letting her mind wander back to that Californio she’d seen weeks before at Shannon and Cady’s store. She thought back to those dark eyes. Those long fingers handling his fancy pen. She pinched her nipples and touched herself inside, trembling and moaning under her own hands, biting the quilt, shaking and shuddering. Loving on herself left her only temporarily satisfied, and after she felt even worse.
When the first rains came, the days stayed warm but the nights fell into coldness. One frosty morning, Nate said he was ready to move out of their old tent and into Henry’s cabin for the coming winter. Elisabeth stomped her feet, but Nate held up a hand in front of her face.
“I’ll not let my books ruin in the next rain. The moisture isn’t good for them. Besides, it’s about time you stopped feeling sorry for yourself about Henry. He’s not coming back. This is our home now, so you better start acting like it.”
“I could give a fig about Henry,” she said as Nate walked toward the cabin.
Nate propped the cabin door with a river rock and went inside. Elisabeth fo
llowed him as a smell of musty sage slunk up her nose. The cabin wasn’t as sturdy as it looked from the outside, with light poking in from chinks gaping in between the logs. Bundles of dried herbs and flowers hung from the rafters of the pitched roof, but the dirt floor didn’t have proper planks, only a massive brown bearskin rug with no head. There was a crude hearth and a wooden bedstead with a dingy white ticking. There were no pots, pans, plates, cups, axes. No windows. Nothing useful but an old bedstead, a rickety rocking chair, and a rough side table with a pair of three-legged stools. A broken coffee grinder lay on its side, with a dozen beans spilled across the table.
Flopping in the rocker near the hearth, she pressed off the dirt floor with the tips of her toes, testing its sway. The chair felt too big for her liking. She rocked on anyway, stewing about how to turn Henry’s shack into a decent home, when she noticed a woodblock carved with a landscape hung over the bedstead. She pulled the block off the wall, examining the carving of a barn and a long fence reaching into the distance, toward a lovely farmhouse placed peaceful amidst an orchard. An orchard! Elisabeth recognized the trees. All those miniature apple trees, heavy with summer bounty. The picture was carved in reverse, but it was the Goodwin Orchard, to be sure.
“This is my home back in Concord,” she said out loud, realizing that was no longer true.
Nate examined the wood carving as she looked around the room for clues. Answers to what sort of man her father had become and why he’d run off with an Indian girl half his age. A gallon tin jug sat by the door. Popping the cork stopper, she got a whiff of stale drink. She put the jug to her lips, but it was empty. She dragged a small trunk out from under the table, opening it. Inside sat two cans of ink, a stack of paper, several blocks of wood, a sandbag, and a leather fold. She unfolded the leather, running her hands along the wood carving implements tucked neatly inside, then rifled through the sheets of paper at the bottom of the trunk. Each paper was printed with a Goodwin Orchard picture from the woodblock, each with varying degrees of ink. Underneath was a book: The Art of Wood Engraving. A wave of sadness splashed over her; she didn’t know her father was an engraver. Behind the trunk was a small Indian basket with nuts inside that she didn’t recognize. Green and pointy at the bottom with a brown “hat” at the top.
Prospects of a Woman Page 6